By tradition and for other reasons, some mathematicians spend some of their time wondering whether stress causes some of their sleeplessness or all of it, or whether coffee causes all of their sleeplessness or some of it, or whether they should direct their worry partly or fully toward something else. Next week, at a conference […]
Tag: sleep
Sheep and aardvarks, together at last
This study is one of the few that explicitly mentions both sheep and aardvarks in its title: “Counting Sheep is a Good Way to get to Sleep, but The Occasional Aardvark Will Wake You Up: How a Salient Event Improves Performance,” Veksler, B. Z., Gray, W. D., Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the […]
Iggy devices: Tocky joins Clocky
Tocky, pictured here [click on the image to see Tocky in action], is the new advanced-engineering sibling of Clocky, the alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday. Clocky moved on wheels. Tocky is wheel-less, being […]
Ingenious: Sleep on Wrong Side, Get Cancer
Today’s Ingenious Theory of the Week will excite most anyone who (1) hopes that electromagnetic waves of all frequencies cause cancer and/or (2) gets into bed on the wrong side: “Sleep on the right side—Get cancer on the left?“ Örjan Hallberg and Olle Johansson, Pathophysiology, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2010, pp. 157-60. The authors, […]
Towards quantifying snoring annoyance
“There exists no gold standard for the measurement of snoring.” But a joint research project from the Human Sleep Research Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute in the US and Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany has recently made progress. With research towards quantifying snoring annoyance which asked – “Is the annoyance of snoring a reliable tool for […]
He went to study anxiety and fear
Our Featured Consultant of the Week this week is Dr Chris Idzikowski BSc PhD CPsychol FBPsS, Director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, which says: “Chris’s formal interest in sleep began in Edinburgh… After Edinburgh he went to study anxiety and fear in Cambridge.” Dr. Idzikowski’s latest accomplishment? An experiment in which hotel employees slip into […]
Sleep, analyzed
Seen on Facebook: this discussion between two Ig Nobel organizers: